For Whom the Bell Tolls is a 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway. It tells the story of Robert Joran, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an anti-fascist guerilla unit in the mountains during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is given an assignment to blow up a bridge to accompany a simultaneous attack on the city of Segovia. The title and epigraph are drawn from "Meditation XVII" of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, an essay by metaphysical poet John Donne.